Northern Lights over the Ore Mountains – Bridges of Light

Großolbersdorf, Saxony (Germany) · January 20, 2026 · shortly after midnight

You do not expect it.
Not at this latitude, not above a quiet village in the Ore Mountains, not on an ordinary January night. And yet, the sky opened.

Red and green auroral lights drifted slowly across Großolbersdorf, soft and restrained, almost tentative. No spectacle, no blazing drama – rather a calm event that unfolded at its own pace. Those who watched carefully were rewarded. Those who hurried might have missed it.

The cause was an unusually strong geomagnetic storm, triggered by an energetic eruption on the Sun. Charged particles reached Earth, were guided by its magnetic field, and penetrated deep into the atmosphere over Central Europe. On this night, the aurora was visible far south into Germany – a rare occurrence.

Colors shaped by altitude and physics

Auroras do not happen “in the sky” in a poetic sense, but high in the upper atmosphere. There, energetic particles collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms. Depending on altitude and gas type, different colors emerge:
green at medium altitudes, red at very high altitudes – the latter usually visible only during strong solar activity.

That night, both colors dominated. A quiet indication that this was no ordinary event.

A bridge between trees

One scene became particularly striking only through the interaction of landscape and sky:
A narrow green arc of auroral light stretched from a small tree on the right side of the image toward a larger tree on the left – like a visual continuation of its bare branches.

Such moments are not coincidences of physics, but of perspective.
The magnetic field shapes the light; the landscape gives it meaning. For a brief moment, a bridge appeared – between two trees, between Earth and sky, between structure and event.

That the image was taken with a smartphone is part of the story. No tripod, no preparation, no journey north. Just perception, timing, and the quiet decision to capture the moment before it dissolved again.

Silence as a quality

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of auroras is not their color, but their silence. No sound, no echo. The phenomenon unfolds entirely independent of us – and precisely in that lies its dignity.

Standing beneath it, one realizes:
The sky is not a ceiling.
It is a process.

Afterglow

Whether such nights will become more frequent remains uncertain. The current solar cycle suggests a phase of increased activity – yet auroras remain gifts, not appointments.

This night over the Ore Mountains was one of them.
Brief, quiet, and unmistakable enough to remain.

Further reading: The technology behind the light

If you are interested in the technical and photographic background of auroras – from atmospheric physics to practical observation – you may find a more detailed discussion here:

👉 Photography and science of the aurora borealis
https://tenckhoff.de/en/europe/norway/lyngenfjord/photo-technique-polar-lights

The article was originally written in the context of aurora observations in northern Norway, but many of the physical principles apply just as well to rare events like this one over Central Europe.